It is easy to see you have used your time off very wisely. How many did you render while you were off? Or do you still have a few days of free time to render?

yeap, had two weeks freetime (this is the second) but in two weeks I have another three and a half week freetime :) and these three weeks is also european soccer championship :)

well I have many new ones, but most I can`t post here :red:

but I was using my time to figure out how the uberenvi light works and have done some tries with blender, what took time because I had absolutely no clue what to do.

Did you read stonemason's UberEnvironment tutorial in the old forums? It's sort of zero'd out all my previous attempts to create good light and shadows, so I believe I'm getting a lot better ambient light and realistic shadows now than before. Basically it's simply to set up UberEnvironment2 with good enough quality for ambient light and one directional sun-/moon-light using raytracing shadows. It's a huge difference, and quite noticable.

BTW, nice renders there, and very interesting composition. ;-)

Edit. Hey, try to use a bump-map on the water-surface, and see what you get!! (remember raytracing).

It is easy to see you have used your time off very wisely. How many did you render while you were off? Or do you still have a few days of free time to render?

yeap, had two weeks freetime (this is the second) but in two weeks I have another three and a half week freetime :) and these three weeks is also european soccer championship :)

well I have many new ones, but most I can`t post here :red:

but I was using my time to figure out how the uberenvi light works and have done some tries with blender, what took time because I had absolutely no clue what to do.

Did you read stonemason's UberEnvironment tutorial in the old forums? It's sort of zero'd out all my previous attempts to create good light and shadows, so I believe I'm getting a lot better ambient light and realistic shadows now than before. Basically it's simply to set up UberEnvironment2 with good enough quality for ambient light and one directional sun-/moon-light using raytracing shadows. It's a huge difference, and quite noticable.

BTW, nice renders there, and very interesting composition. ;-)

Edit. Hey, try to use a bump-map on the water-surface, and see what you get!! (remember raytracing).

all these renders in this thread use just one distant light and UverEnvironment2 :) nothing more (except the temple render, in it there are two spotlights for the fire instead of the distant light). For all renders in my thread at the old forum I have used just distant and spotlights.